Financial workers in Mumbai are
stopping work early this afternoon as traders join what may be a
record Indian television audience for the nation’s cricket World
Cup semi-final against Pakistan.

Standard Chartered Plc (STAN), Bharti Axa General Insurance and
Pramerica Asset Managers Pvt. are among companies that allowed
staff in India’s financial capital to watch the event that began
2.30 p.m. local time in the northern state of Punjab. In
Pakistan, the Karachi Stock Exchange closed 90 minutes early and
government workers were given the afternoon off.

“The market has virtually gone to sleep at the moment, all
eyes are on the TV screens,” said Sandeep Bagla, senior vice
president in charge of rates trading at ICICI Primary Dealership,
who is watching the match in his office. “It has been a very
long time since I saw markets this quiet.”

At the stadium about 130 miles from the border with
Pakistan, Prime Ministers Manmohan Singh and Yousuf Raza Gilani
joined billionaires Mukesh Ambani and Sajjan Jindal to witness
the match between the nuclear-armed neighbors, the first on
Indian soil since the 2008 attack by Pakistani terrorists in
Mumbai. Trading volume on Asia’s fourth-biggest stock market may
drop as much as 20 percent, said D.K. Aggarwal, chairman of New
Delhi-based SMC Wealth Management Services Ltd.

Television Viewers

In Pakistan, the volume is likely to be as much as 30
percent below average, said Mohammed Sohail, chief executive
officer of Topline Securities Ltd. in Karachi. An estimated 80
million viewers will watch the game, pushing advertising rates
to a record, according to Mumbai-based Audience Measurement &
Analytics Ltd.

“This is the mother of all encounters,” said Ipshita Saha,
a 28-year-old marketing professional at Dish TV India Ltd. in
Gurgaon, near New Delhi. “With India now close to winning the
Cup, no one wants to miss it.”

Tariffs for 10-second commercials have risen more than
fourfold to 1.8 million rupees ($40,194), from 400,000 rupees at
the start of the tournament on Feb. 19, the Economic Times
reported March 28, citing agencies handling enquiries for
advertisers.

Standard Chartered, the U.K. bank that earns most of its
earnings from Asia, put up screens to show the match in its
cafeterias in Mumbai. SMC Wealth Management is showing the game
on 15 televisions on its trading floor and letting staff leave
when the markets close, Aggarwal said.

Sporting Rivalry

Reliance Infrastructure Ltd., controlled by billionaire
Anil Ambani, has declared a holiday for its staff, while his
brother Mukesh’s Reliance Industries Ltd. has awarded employees
a half-day off to “cheer the Indian team to victory,”
according to a company e-mail.

Coca-Cola Co.’s India unit and Mandhana Industries Ltd. (MNDN), an
Indian maker of apparels with 5,000 employees in Mumbai and
Bangalore, will give workers the option of taking the afternoon
off. Companies such as Mumbai-based brokerage LKP Securities Ltd.
and Castrol India Ltd. (CSTRL) will let staff come dressed in blue
clothes, the color of the Indian team jersey.

“This is the biggest sporting rivalry in Asia if not the
world,” said Anil Nandas, a New Delhi-based property developer,
who was born three years after Pakistan was carved out of India
in 1947, generating more than six decades of mutual hostility.
“This is the match that everyone in both countries has been
hoping for and losing doesn’t bear thinking about.”

Repairing Relations

The game follows two days of talks that ended yesterday
between the interior secretaries of the two countries in New
Delhi, where they agreed on exchange visits by teams leading the
terror-attack probe. The two sides also vowed to hold biannual
security talks to repair relations still strained 28 months
after 10 Pakistani militants armed with assault weapons and
grenades killed 166 people in a 72-hour siege of Mumbai.

Muslim Pakistan and predominantly Hindu India have fought
three wars, two of them over their conflicting claims over the
territory of Kashmir, since the two nations were created at
independence from Britain in 1947. India, which blames Pakistan-
based Lashkar-e-Taiba for the Mumbai attack, has accused its
neighbor of failing to prosecute those who planned the carnage.

The attack shattered a dialogue that over five years had
increased cross-border trade and strengthened transport and
cultural links. Gilani this week accepted Singh’s invitation to
attend the match in the latest round of diplomacy. Improved ties
are central to U.S.-led efforts to fight Taliban and al-Qaeda
militants in Afghanistan, where India and Pakistan compete for
influence.

Diplomacy, Tensions

The meeting between the two leaders, the first in a year,
is unlikely to yield any major peace announcements, according to
Kalim Bahadur, a former professor of South Asian Studies at New
Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University.

“This has given both leaders an opportunity to restart the
dialogue without being seen to surrender,” said Bahadur. “It
will improve the atmosphere but I wouldn’t expect the leaders to
try to tackle any of the big issues. This is just a first of
many steps.”

Cricket is the most popular sport in India and Pakistan and
over the last fifty years the game and politics have become
intertwined. While the sport has been a tool of diplomacy, at
other times, it has inflamed tensions.

Pakistani fans threw stones at Indian players during a
match in Karachi in 1989 and a supporter went on the pitch
ripping the shirt of the Indian captain. In 2000, Hindu
nationalists dug up the cricket pitch in New Delhi to protest
against the Pakistani team’s visit.

“This is different from the U.S. Super Bowl -- this match
has politics, nationalism and the history of the partition,”
said Alam Srinivas, one of the authors of the book “IPL Cricket
& Commerce: An Inside Story.” “When India and Pakistan play a
cricket match, both countries are completely transfixed. The
streets will be empty when the game is on.”

The winner of today’s encounter will play Sri Lanka in the
final in Mumbai on April 2.